Marianne Breslauer was a German photographer. She is known for her stunning street photography. After taking photography lessons in Berlin from 1927 to 1929, she became an admirer of Frieda Riess and later of André Kertész, even though she saw herself as a photographic journalist. She briefly studied under Man Ray in Paris in 1929. At this time, Paris was the center of the avant-garde, with many ambitious young women landing in Man Ray’s studio, which dominated photography. Upon returning to Berlin at the beginning of 1930, she developed a style of quiet, poetic street scenes, which she sold one at a time to illustrated magazines. Later that year, she began working at the Ullstein photo studio in Berlin, headed by Elsbeth Heddenhausen, where she mastered darkroom skills.
Under Elisabeth Heddenhausen at the largest German publisher of illustrated works, these photographs led to a position at the Ullstein Photography Studio, the most advanced of its time. Marianne Breslauer was commissioned to do photo reporting on everyday Berlin topics and advertising photography and portraiture. After her two-month visit to Palestine in 1931, numerous images she brought back were published in periodicals, including Die Dame, Der Querschnitt, and the Frankfurter Illustrated. After two years at the Ullstein Studio, she returned to Paris as a freelancer in 1932, working for the Mauritius Agency. She photographed Pablo Picasso and Ambroise Villard for Mauritius. The Academic Agency commissioned her to travel to northern Spain in the spring of 1933 with author and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach. Returning to National Socialist Germany, she could not publish under her own name.
Marianne emigrated to Amsterdam in 1936 to marry Walter Feilchenfeldt, an art dealer who had fled Germany after the Nazis destroyed an auction of modern art. Here, she gave birth to her first child, Walter. She gave up photography to concentrate on her other activities due to her family life and work as an art dealer. Her second son, Konrad, was born in Zurich in 1939. In 1948, the couple opened an art business specializing in French paintings and 19th-century artwork. From 1966 to 1990, she ran the business with her son Walter after her husband died in 1953. She died in Zollikon, near Zurich, on February 7, 2001, at 91.
